I just returned from the SAND conference, an amazing group of scientists and non-dual teachers who are exploring the further reaches of human consciousness and bring an understanding of awakening to the mainstream. I also just put the final editing touches on my new book "When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Spiritual Awakening Process" to be released by New Harbinger Press in June. It includes excerpts from many descriptions of awakening experiences collected by me over the past 30 years, and reveals what I have learned about the portals, the phenomena and the challenges of awakening, and how to address them and come into the harmonious balance that self-realization ultimately brings.

Kundalini has not often been addressed by non-dual teachers, and yet changes in energy are inevitable in any transformative process. We are energy beings, a molecular structure, and awakening is about the reorganizing of our internal world so that our original or primal consciousness can become primary in our lives, bringing us peace, acceptance, intuitions and new depth of understanding about the human condition. If you are in a kundalini process your own life force is inviting you to a new perspective and a clearing of old patterns and beliefs and reactivity imprinted by your conditioning. This is what freedom means -- we become free of our old ways of seeing and being -- and learn to be with the moment, rather than entangled in past and future concerns and anxieties. It is a challenging passage for many, but a grace beyond expression when it has unfolded. I have attempted in my writings to bring the non-dual world and the understanding of kundalini together. Non-Duality implies a direct realization of Oneness -- of the fact there is one consciousness underlying all existence, and non-dual awakenings have typically brought forth teachers who see this as a flash of realization that can happen in any moment. They have tended to discount all the energetic changes that may precede or follow such a flash. But without some energetic change our subtle body cannot hold and live from our realization because we have been programmed or wired to live in particular human cultural and family patterns. Awakened consciousness is free, for the most part, of these patterns. Awakened consciousness also shifts the brain dynamics so new possibilities of perception and functioning may arise. All of these are energetic and possibly chemical changes. So if you are in a kundalini process you are being invited by the consciousness within you to awaken to a new potential, and express in your world a new way of being.

I was happy to be able to speak at SAND about kundalini and begin the deep dialogue that will promote a better understanding of this process among people who are exploring the nature of consciousness.